I was only 2,000 miles short of the end of my 13,000 mile bicycle journey to
China when something bad happened.

I lost my bike.

In truth, I didn't exactly lose it. It was stolen from me as I slept.

But this was not your ordinary cable-cutting bike theft. Plenty of cycle tourists
have had their bicycles nicked, but I think I have the distinction of being
the only one to have had his bike stolen by a horse.

It was the small hours of Sunday morning. I was camped on the riverbank not
far from Ulaan Baator, asleep in my tent.

And then, suddenly, my tent collapsed on top of me. The sound of tearing canvas
quickly gave way to the beat of galloping hooves.

My bicycle had been ripped from the tent, to which it had been locked, and
dragged away by a four-legged bike-thief. The galloping faded into the distance
as, still half asleep, I struggled to escape the tangled remnants of my tent.
I fought my way into the outside, and found myself standing in the silence and
darkness of a moonless night, bikeless and alone. The evening before, I had
welcomed this darkness for the views it allowed of a spectacular meteorite shower.
Now, I was afraid: afraid that whoever it was - assuming the horse hadn't been
acting alone - would be coming back soon for the rest of my belongings. I worried
especially they would get my diaries - precious to me but worthless to anyone
else. Gathering my thoughts and as many of my remaining possessions as I could
carry, I went to hide behind a low ridge, and waited to see if anyone would
come back. A few minutes passed. Nothing; everything was still, quiet and dark,
just the gentle sound of the river flowing by, a few yards from where my tent
had been.

I went back to my campsite and grabbed everything else I could find. I hid
half my stuff behind the ridge, and, prioritising as best I could in the dark,
staggered with as much as I could carry across the steppe towards the lights
I could see shining a few miles away to the south. I kept my torch switched
off, afraid that the beam would attract the robbers' attention. In the event,
my position was quickly given away by barking dogs, beaconing news of a stranger
in the steppe from one homestead to the next.

I struggled across the rough ground; several times I tripped and fell in holes.
I was worried about breaking a leg but I felt I needed to get to the road as
quickly as possible in case the attackers came back after me. They must have
known that I would have money with me; Mongolia is a poor country and presumably
someone who would steal a bike would be interested in money too.

It took perhaps one hour, perhaps two, to reach the lights: as luck would have
it, they came from a check-point on the road heading east from Ulaan Baator
into the desert. In a little booth I found a man whose duty it was to raise
the wooden barrier and allow vehicles to pass - or not, according to his whim.
He smelled of alcohol from twenty paces. I tried to explain to him what had
happened; he stuck his tongue out and complained how hard his job was.

He stuck his tongue out again. "Seven different checks, it's a lot to
ask ."

I sensed that I would not be getting far with the man in the booth. The responsibility
for seven different checks weighed on him too heavily. I wandered round the
back of his booth; stretched out on the concrete steps was a man in police uniform.

"Hello, are you a policeman?" I asked. At the time it seemed a reasonable
opening line.

The man looked surprised.

"I am English," I added, unhelpfully. "I have been robbed. I
need to find the police."

The man nodded, and said something in Mongolian. Another man appeared, followed
by a woman. She was eating sunflower seeds and spraying their shells over a
wide field of fire. The three of them conferred. The man in the booth came out
to see what was going on, and stuck his tongue out.

After several minutes of theatrical mime, sound-effects and jumping up and
down, I felt I was beginning to get the message across.

I sleep - two hands under head - in tent - triangle shape in the
air - man on horse - Monty Python-style coconut shell noises - steal
my bicycle - rotate fists in front of chest. (Why do people always mime
"bicycle" by pedalling their hands like that? It looks more like Chinese
shadow-boxing than anything to do with a bicycle. Any attempt to put it into
practice would be doomed to painful failure.)

The two uniformed men nodded, climbed into a car, and beckoned me to follow.
The booth man was left to look after the check-point; he stuck his tongue out.
We drove wildly across the rutted steppe, feeble headlights barely picking out
the large rocks that littered our path.

"Which way?" mimed the driver.

"I've no idea," I mimed back. "We've been spinning so much I've
lost my bearings." I spun my finger in the air.

The driver spun the steering wheel.

"No, no, no, we have already been spinning enough, I mean. We don't need
to spin any more." It is hard to do tenses in mime - past, present and
future merge.

A bang, a crunch of metal and a sudden stop announced that the car had hit
a trench. The policemen climbed out to inspect the damage. I climbed out to
inspect the trench - I recognised it as the one into which I had fallen and
nearly broken my leg an hour or two earlier, a hundred yards from where my tent
had been.

Over by the riverbank we found the remains of my tent. The policemen walked
up and down, tutting. After a while, tutted out, they climbed back into the
car. I wondered what clues they might have uncovered in the course of their
tutting. Perhaps they would send for a forensic team to comb the scene of the
crime, taking hoof-prints and collecting mane samples for DNA analysis. In any
case, they remained tight-lipped.

Stuck in the trench, the car would not budge; we climbed out again and started
heaving, hauling, pushing and shoving, sometimes in unison but more often in
opposing directions. A steady stream of oil was now flowing from the car's undercarriage.
Suddenly the wheels found purchase and the car lurched backwards out of the
trench. The policemen drove me back to their checkpoint, where the man in the
booth had passed out, tongue still jutting out between clenched teeth.

As the first hints of dawn began to lighten the eastern sky, a jeep arrived
from police headquarters. They drove me back to Ulaan Baator, leaving the man
in the booth to dream of his seven different checks, and me to contemplate completing
my bicycle journey without a bicycle.

It was August. Iraq was in the grip of violence. Thousands faced starvation
in Darfur. But, for some reason, news editors liked the story about the Englishman
who had his bike stolen by a Mongolian horse. The story appeared in newspapers
and on television around the world. Since I had foolishly failed to arrange
for TV crews to be present at the time of the robbery itself, I had to re-enact
it for the cameras a few days later, in broad daylight, in what remained of
my tent, on a pavement in down-town Ulaan Baator. I suppose when they got back
to the studio, they mixed in some library footage of a horse galloping away
with a guilty expression on his face.

Thanks to the media coverage of my plight, I quickly received not just one
but five offers of replacement bikes from companies back home. Should I accept
just the one and carry on with my journey? Or accept all of them and set up
a bike shop in Ulaan Baator?

I was touched to receive hundreds of email messages from strangers, many of
them fellow cyclists, who had heard about my predicament and wanted to sympathise.
I had one very angry message from a Mongolian, who told me that his country
makes the news internationally only about once a year, and that the last thing
it needed was for its 2004 slot to be a story that cast Mongolians in a bad
light. I felt bad about that. Let me set the record straight here. Mongolia
is a beautiful country, and, with one notable exception, everyone I met there
was extremely friendly and welcoming.

Losing the bike wasn't really so bad in the end. Marin sent me a nice new one.
But I also lost something much harder to replace: a pair of official-issue Russian
Border Guard trousers.

So if, while you're touring Mongolia, you should happen to see a horse riding
around on a bicycle and wearing camouflage trousers, you'll know that he's the
one.